Over 10 million people without electricity: Cuba experiences new large-scale blackout

Cuba’s national power grid has completely failed, leaving more than 10 million people without power. This is the fourth major blackout in the country in recent times.

This is reported by Al Jazeera.

State-owned power company Electric Union (UNE) said the outage occurred on the evening of August 2. The company did not say what caused the outage. It is also not yet known when power will be fully restored.

Even before the massive outage, Havana was experiencing outages due to damaged transformers, power line failures, and a shortage of generating capacity. Dozens of emergency calls remained in various areas of the capital.

After a complete collapse of the power grid, Cuban authorities traditionally begin restoring power to critical infrastructure. First, hospitals, water systems, and food processing plants receive power, followed by large power plants.

According to the publication, this is the fourth nationwide power outage in recent times. In July alone, Cuba’s power system went out three times over a period of nine days.

The long-term crisis in the energy sector is associated with fuel shortages, a shortage of spare parts, and the wear and tear of thermal power plants, a significant part of which has been operating for over three decades without proper modernization.

Cuban authorities blame US sanctions for the situation, while government critics believe that years of underfunding and inefficient management of the energy sector are the main causes.

Due to the prolonged blackouts, the islanders are facing disruptions in transportation, water supply, communications and medical facilities. They are also having problems with food storage and daily life in the heat.